Notices by Kevlin Henney (kevlin@mastodon.social)

The Maritime Approximation

"At ¾ km (within ⅐%), a nautical mile on Titan falls midpoint between that of the Moon and Mars. Of course, Titan’s seas and lakes are of liquid methane and ethane rather than water, and a human landing is exceedingly (and disappointingly) unlikely within my lifetime. But who knows, perhaps one day explorers will navigate Titan using a new nautical mile across new seas."

https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-maritime-approximation-8b71d5041cd5

🙏

A reminder: in code, naming is a design activity; it is not merely labelling.

Ah, my website nemesis: poor validation and input processing.

Just entered my valid phone number to be told, in red, that my phone number was not valid. Was it the use of an international prefix? No. Was it that I used spaces in my phone number? Yes!

Forget NP completeness, AI fairness, etc., if we look at software as it is built, space removal has a claim to be one of the biggest challenges in modern software development 🙃

As the term 'intelligence' is used in 'artificial intelligence', it is perhaps worth asking, what kind of intelligence do AI systems represent? Confident and detail focused, but naïve, easily misled and lacking in common sense, worldliness, situational awareness, fairness, imagination, empathy, emotional intelligence and social intelligence ?